New Record set for Twitter Retweets

Probably one of the best Oscar nights I’ve ever seen. Ellen pulled out all the stops and made history with Twitter. We now have a new record for retweets, and I was a part of history in the making. Actually, it was a pretty cool experience. It’s not often that I get to be involved in something so unprecedented. But it does speak to the influence celebrities have on social media, and calling fellow tweeters to join in the task.In one of Ellen’s random moments, she pulled a number of celebrities and tweeted it to her followers. She challenged everyone to retweet and break the former record of retweets previously held by Barack Obama.

Prior to last night, Barack Obama’s touching campaign hug with his wife, Michelle had held the record at a whopping 781,823 retweets. No small task in the world of Twitter.

Even more unexpected was the impact all the tweeting had on Twitter central. The servers were so overloaded, that the site went down for about 15 minutes.

So what are the lessons learned from last night’s Twitter event? Twitter has incredible reach around the world, and enables us to connect with one another in a way that we have never seen before. It’s been used to keep the world informed of the crisis in Venezuala and the Ukraine. And the reports are instantaneous from the general publics vantage point. Great to see how the world is getting smaller with tools like Twitter.